Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/105573
FROM THE EDITOR Getting schooled on spreading specialty LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Fresh Cup welcomes letters to the editor at comments@freshcup.com. Letters must be 250 words or less. Authors must provide verifiable phone number and city and state of residence. 12 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com shouldn't specialty coffee be of interest to them? Yet, listening to them discuss the product, it was clear that for most of them, coffee was far from a passion. How do we turn these potential customers into specialtycoffee diehards? There are multi-tiered solutions we could cook up—or that MBA students could spend weeks crunching the numbers on—but in the specialty-coffee spirit of connecting with customers, I prefer to focus on the personal aspect. Every customer who walks through your door is someone you can infuse with passion about specialty coffee, and that excited person could in turn convert other potential patron. Creating that deeper interest isn't easy, but it's possible. In this month's "Nine Bars" column (p. 48), PT's Coffee Roasting vet Holly Bastin discusses the emergence of single-origin espresso and juxtaposes it with the dependable taste of blends. While this topic might make coffee folks perk up, it's likely to fall on deaf ears with the coffee-drinking public. However, her story explores how we can get customers to care about such minutia, and how simple things like taking an interest in the customer and easing them into the tasting experience—excellent customer service, in other words—can lead once-casual customers to an "a-ha!" moment. It's not dissimilar from my favorite of the ideas pitched at Deloitte: having a sommelier-type coffee expert in the store exposing people to good coffee. You are that expert at your store every day, and your passion for specialty coffee can be contagious. With our collective effort, maybe the business students of today will be the specialty-coffee drinkers of tomorrow. STEPHANIE KREUTTER I f you were charged with the task of revamping a national high-end grocery chain's coffee program to jumpstart sales, what actions would you take? This hypothetical scenario was posed to a group of MBA students in January at the National Case Competition, an annual event held by consulting company Deloitte. Sixteen four-person teams from the nation's top business schools went head-to-head pitching their solutions. Deciding the contest's outcome was a panel of judges featuring both Deloitte employees and "experts" from the specialty-coffee industry, and I was among those in the latter category. The competition is essentially a way for Deloitte to recruit up-and-coming talent for its workforce, but inviting industry people to take part lends a layer of intricacy to the proceedings—the competitors' cases don't just have to make financial sense; they also must fit with the sensibilities of specialty coffee. And what did the teams propose? The ideas that made it to the final round included roasting in-store, adding a sommelier-type expert offering samples and talking coffee, and implementing a touch-screen display to help customers learn more about coffee. While I enjoyed the opportunity to take in the competitors' ideas, perhaps the most valuable part of the experience for me was listening to "non-coffee people" discuss the bean from a business perspective. The nuances of flavor and production we all devote so much energy to did not resonate much with them. Rather, they were more concerned with how to leverage the product for maximum profit, which makes sense given the assignment. But in addition to being the potential future leaders of tomorrow, these business students also could represent the average specialty coffee customer—their disposable income gives them money to devote toward the finer things, so why